


running doesn't change anything

by SnowStormSkies



Series: Surrender [2]
Category: Tokio Hotel
Genre: BDSM, Collars, Corporal Punishment, Discipline, Foursome - M/M/M/M, M/M, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:59:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnowStormSkies/pseuds/SnowStormSkies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom has been bad. And now, he must face up to it, but he doesn't want to. And so, he runs. And he runs and runs, until he ends up running right back around to his band, and straight into punishment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	running doesn't change anything

**Author's Note:**

> _endless love for sub!Tom, and foursome fic! :D_   
>  _Whole band foursome, btw._

**Prompt:** Day 2 - Prompt: Kink - Spanking  
 **Title:** _running doesn't change anything_  
Author: [](http://snowstormskies.livejournal.com/profile)[**snowstormskies**](http://snowstormskies.livejournal.com/)  
 **Warnings:** _Spanking, bad language, BDSM, incest, foursome, sub!Tom._  
 **Description:** _Tom has been bad. And now, he must face up to it, but he doesn't want to. And so, he runs._  
 **Author notes:** _endless love for sub!Tom, and foursome fic! :D_ _Whole band foursome, btw. Endless love to Casey for beta._  
 **Link:**[](http://bitofkink.livejournal.com/profile)[ **bitofkink**](http://bitofkink.livejournal.com/) here, [](http://hydrafics.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://hydrafics.livejournal.com/)**hydrafics** here , **th_fanfic** here, AO3, THF, **snowstormskies** here.

 

 

He shouldn’t have done it.

He knows he shouldn’t have done it. It was a bad idea right from the beginning, and he knew it, and so did everybody else.

But he did it anyway.

Gustav told him – fucking told him flat out to his face – that bringing up anything to do with Bill’s sexuality was gonna get him in deep trouble, and Tom had stayed away from that, a tiny bit of self-preservation mixing with his desire to protect Bill’s secret. But he’d also been told that Georg was completely and utterly  off limits as well to his normal banter and inane commentary, and well… He hadn’t been able to resist.

They’d played it off as a band, Bill coming to his rescue and Georg laughing it off, and Tom was confident that nobody had noticed anything odd, but the second the words about   _Georg is a virgin_ and all the rest came out of his mouth, he felt Bill’s glare burn into the side of his head.

_Fuuuuuuck._

Why did he do it? He asked himself that over and over again throughout the rest of the interview, and the photoshoot, feeling the rest of the band’s tension as he was physically moved by his brother into place. Bill obviously didn’t trust him even to place his own feet, and they were kicked - although gently – into position. Gustav’s hand on the back of his shirt told him he wasn’t clear.

Not by a long shot.

Worry shot through him though he did his best to keep it off his face, but Tom Kaulitz does not own a poker face. He wears his heart on his XXXL sized sleeve and everybody knows it.

It had been the most gruelling three hours of his life.

Afterwards, during dinner, Tom’d been … not frozen out, per se, but everything was perfunctory in his band’s words and actions towards him, Georg placed his meal, which Tom had had no part in choosing, in front of him without a word, and Gustav denied him the chance to have a beer by taking the alcohol menu off the table with only a raised eyebrow.  

Damnit.

Afterwards, in the foyer, he was sent to the toilet with Saki because they couldn’t go fucking anywhere without being escorted now thanks to creepy fans who had telescopic lenses, and the last he’d seen before the door banged shut was the three of them talking in a huddle.

Double damn.

He was ordered into the van after dinner, sitting uneasily in the back next to Bill, as Georg and Gustav sat in silence in the front, and the ride back to the hotel was both very quiet and very short. They hadn’t had time to relax before the hotel rose up in front of them, a brilliant mess of steel and glass rising twenty stories in the air.

Before he got out, Bill handed him a red card, and his heart sank.

 _Red._ He’d gotten fucking _red._ He knew he’d fucked up – knew it and was going to take the punishment but he’d expected yellow.   _Maybe_ orange, if Georg was in a bad mood, but … red was the fucking worst.

Now, Bill’s waiting for him to get out of the van, his hands on his hips, but they’re in the underground parking garage to the hotel. Nobody’s gonna notice them here, and Tom allows himself a tiny moment of weakness.

 _“Red,_ Bill?” he asks, and his hand holding the slip of card is starting to shake. _“_ Come off it, you guys – that wasn’t worth a red!”

Bill steps forward, his expression both flatly determined and very calm. It’s not hard to know why - Tom knows his brother’s been assigned to get him out of the car and up to his room. When this kind of thing happens - when he gets handed a card and it’s a bad one - his band mates divide up what’s going to happen so everything moves as seamlessly as possible. Sometimes, it’s Gustav who has to get him upstairs, or it’s Georg who’s in charge of his dinner, or Bill who runs interference with the management to get Tom and him in the same room in the hotel and Tom just has to accept it. He’s well aware that it’s likely to be Georg calling the shots tonight because Bill was the one who handed him the card. But he doesn’t like it and he doesn't’ think he deserved a red one.

Red is the worst thing ever.

Except black. Apparently. He’s never got black. Yet.

It takes a while. A long while, where Bill has to lean into the car and all the security personnel take a step backwards or six, and Tom ends up being dragged out by his hand. It hurts - his fingers are raw from all the playing in the last few days, and Bill doesn’t hesitate to use a little pressure to make him move.

 “ _Bill!”_ He hisses, but Bill doesn’t care. Holding Tom’s wrist tight, Bill frogmarches him across the concrete expanse, and drags him into lift. Security doesn’t bat an eyelid but Tom’s cheeks burn.

 

-

 

He’s running.

IN the back of his head, he knows this is the stupidest, most pathetic thing he’s ever done in his life, and he’s so fucking pissed at himself, but he knows, he knows, he knows, that he can’t stay in that room a moment longer.

Bill stepped into the bathroom to collect the jar of Vaseline he’d used that morning during his makeup routine, and Tom seized his chance. Wearing no coat, only a hoodie and a dreadscarf on top of his post-concert clothes, he’d yanked the door open, bolted down the corridor and into the lift at full tilt.

Just before the doors had closed, he’d seen Bill’s face sticking out their bedroom – even though it was in Bill’s name – and the look of … Disappointment? Anger? Frustration? Sadness? Had stuck him even as he hammered the button for the ground floor.

The descent in the lift feels endless, and Tom paces around and around in the small, enclosed space. He feels sick, and even though only about thirty seconds have passed, he’s ready to call it quits.

But then he arrives in the lobby and he doesn’t give himself time to think. He just has to _move._

Outside, he  uses the doorman to hail a taxi, stuffing a twenty euro tip into the white gloved hand – and is now one foot into the cab when he sees Bill, followed by Georg come steaming into the lobby. 

Saki is not far behind.

He’s got a hard a choice. Man up and go back inside and take his punishment, or leave, and deal with it in the morning.

“Where to, sir?” the cabbie asks.

Bill spots him out the window and his face turns white. Georg is facing the wrong direction, heading for the hotel bar, obviously thinking Tom wouldn’t dare to actually _leave_ the hotel, probably hunting down an alcoholic stupor instead of punishment, but he doesn’t get a chance.

“Anywhere.” Tom decides, abruptly. He’ll deal with it in the morning.

 

\--

 

He didn’t get till morning. He got two hours.

He’d literally only driven around for a few minutes, asked the cabbie to drop him off at a restaurant, and spent the two hours drinking cups of surprisingly good decaf and reading a few two day old papers. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that and he would have enjoyed his impromptu eight o’clock in the evening jaunt but every fifteen seconds, his phone buzzed with a call, or a text, or an email.

He refused to look at the messages. Or hear them.

Tom couldn’t deal with them right now. He knew he’d run for a reason and Bill wasn’t gonna be pissed at him, he was going to be…. Monumentally furious. Raging. Crying in anger, inside, stone faced on the outside.

Gustav would steam. For _weeks._

Georg… Tom doesn’t even know. This is the first time he’s ever pushed Georg like this and he doesn’t know where his oldest… _disciplinarian_ stands on this kind of behaviour.

He’s not betting it’ll be letting him off easy.

Tom fishes the red card out of his pocket. It’s nothing special, a piece of paper neatly clipped to about the size of a credit card, and laminated – Gustav’s doing, no doubt because he’s that meticulous – and it doesn’t even have any writing on.

They’d designed the system a few years ago – nearly two, if he remembers correctly – because he needed it.

That was the honest truth.

At age sixteen, he was fast approaching burnout, and everybody could see but him. Not really through drugs, or drink, though he’d experimented, as they all had, and he had a penchant for weed which even now has never really left.

Emotionally and mentally crippled, with the long days, short nights, party life, and the constant rotation of people coming in and out of his life, he was on the road to nowhere. He was rude, short tempered, over sexed, and underestimated, and the only people who understood him were his band. Who were the ones who also sustain his abuse, incidentally.

And they’d put a stop to it.

By force.

Gustav came up with the punishment system, Georg was the one to tell him, Bill was the one who kept him in the room while he ranted and raged about how   _nobody was going to tell him what do to, and he was a man, a fucking man, and he wasn’t going to go to time out, no he wasn’t, nobody could make him do that, he was going to fucking win this argument, you can bet on it, baby brother!_

They’d been honest with him. The band, to the outside world, was amazing. Inside, it was ready to fracture under stress, and he was a large part of it. Not the sole part, but a large part – pushing away Bill, hurting everybody with his remarks, being unreliable…

He’d been humiliated. And hurt. And heartbroken.

And kind of grateful they’d given him a second chance.

The next morning, Gustav explained the rules to him very clearly, and gave him a list in different colours to help him remember.

There are six colours. Three good, three bad.

Purple, Blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. There was a mythical colour black that he’d never earned but he was encouraged to think of it as a six level system.

Purple is he’s been amazing, and he’s gonna be rewarded _really_ well, and getting that is hard. It doesn’t just mean keeping his mouth shut, it means he’s been polite, and well behaved and played well at the concert, and wasn’t bad during his interviews… Same kind of thing in the studio – he attended his guitar lesson with good grace, did his practise for two separate hour long sessions, and was clean and tidy and polite and pleasant and ergh, everything. He’s only earned a couple of them, and they keep raising the bar on it, but the rewards… In ten times, he might get it _never._ Seriously. Two years of this, and he’s got maybe twenty to his name.

Oh, but they’re worth it. More than worth it.

Rewards are awesome – his favourite foods at dinner, being treated to a massage in the hotel spas, when they get time off, he gets to choose where they spend their first – and sometimes only – activity like paintballing, or at the kart track, film nights – he fucking loves film nights - or swimming on a private beach. Or sometimes, it’s things; new caps, new shoes, some new jewellery that he’s been eyeing  for a while. It’s all about the _time_ to spend with his band and his brother, and Georg and Gustav that he values, not so much the things, even though they’re nice too, and since they’re constantly going from pillar to post, they’re a reminder of his good behaviour.

There are other things on the table – better things that involve ….ahem. Interesting stuff and lots of fun but those are hard to describe when he’s in a public place.

Next step down is blue, and that’s … he’s been good but not amazing, and Tom hits that maybe five times out of ten. It’s a good base line, Georg tells him, and Tom can handle it. If he slips a couple of times, he gets dropped from purple to blue, and it’s not… not good because he should aim high, but it’s okay. His rewards here are smaller – he gets to pick his desserts, a glass of his favourite beer, a new album from i-tunes, a head massage from Georg, a drum lesson from Gustav. Time with Bill just to hug and feel loved.

Next step down is green.

Green is barely tolerable. He’s done what was asked of him, but not in a good way, and he’s skating on thin ice. No reward, but no punishment either.

Down from that, yellow. Yellow is pisspoor behaviour, Gustav tells him, and he means it. Being rude, being _bitey_ in interviews, as Bill says, not doing as he’s told… The ice is cracking, and it’s the first punishment step. He’s not rewarded, and he usually earns it maybe two times in ten. Bad days are hard days and yellow days _suck ass_.

Punishment varies but usually he gets time out.

And yes, it fucking sucks that he’s almost eighteen and a half and he get time out, but Gustav insisted on it.

It’s not about punishing him physically. It’s about making him stop going around in circles and start thinking again. He gets to spend eighteen minutes – one for every year of his life – sat on a bed, or a chair, or on the floor in a corner, and just… stop. No phone or ipod to distract him, and he’s not allowed to talk or try to communicate in anyway until someone comes and gets him.

Every time, it’s the longest eighteen minutes of his life.

Yellow also means no dessert, no alcohol, no girls, no going out, and no being left on his own. He gets babysat for the rest of the day and evening, before being sent to bed really, really early. He fucking hates it, but it gets the message across. A yellow day is almost always followed by a green day, at least.

Another step away from purple is orange. Days when he gets an orange card is when he’s pushing boundaries, pissing people off deliberately, being lazy, unfair, and even hurtful when he’s twisting the knife. He’s not proud of having days like that. They’re horrible, and he doesn’t know why he does half the things he does, but he does, and he gets punished for it.

And it’s the first contact punishment.

_Fuck his life._

Tom Kaulitz gets spanked.

He hated it when they first brought it up, and he hates it now, and he wishes he never ever agreed to it, but he gets spanked. A orange card means either going over a lap – which he cannot abide but has to – or being bent over a table or chair – which he also cannot stand but has to – and it’s up to the person who gave him the card as to how he gets it.

In the café, his cheeks burn, but not as badly as his backside will when he gets home.

Orange is pretty much the same as yellow as far as everything else goes, but _longer._ He gets babysat for three days, no clubbing for a week, no dessert for three days… kind of everything sucks. He usually gets one about once every four weeks or so, which is pretty good going when they’re on tour. In the studio, less often. He’s much less stressed out when they're not on the road.

Red. 

Red is his arch nemesis, and he very much hates it.

It’s everything he hates. No choice, no control, a lot of pain. 

A bare bottom spanking with the paddle every day and an enema twice a week, no dessert for a week, no clubbing for two, babysitting for two weeks, and he gets… collar and leash time.

 And that fucking blows _ass._

Georg bought it, and he says it’s pretty nice, and so does Bill, but Tom hates it. It’s good quality leather with a chain section made of heavy industrial chain, and he gets it morning and night when they’re in hotels or on the bus,  leashed and kept within two feet of whoever’s on Tom watch. And he gets time out for the slightest infraction when he’s on red when normally he gets three warnings.

He gets red about four times a year, whether or not they're on tour, and he hates it.

Bill messages him again, and Tom recognises the ringtone. He checks the clock on the wall, surprised at the amount of time that’s passed but he doesn’t answer it until he’s read the article on Chinese farming economy being worth less than it was five years ago. He’s delaying the inevitable but actually reading the message is going to be so hard.

It takes him eleven minutes to actually open it but it’s not what he expected. Or maybe it is, and it’s just not what he thought he should expect. If that makes sense. .

_Come back._

He flexes his fingers, tries to work out what to say next. He ends up with : _I’m scared._ It’s hard for him to admit, and he’s not trying to get out of it, but he is scared.

Gustav texts him next.   _I know. But you need to come back. It’s very serious._

Fuck.   _How bad?_

 _David’s threatening to call the police._ Georg sends, and Tom knows that they’re probably all standing around in the hotel room, comparing each message that they send and receive so nobody is out of the loop. Tom drops his head into his hands but Georg sends another one. _I know you’re scared, and you don’t want to be punished. Come back now, and we can work through this together. Us four._

 _Please Tom,_ Bill sends. And Tom holds his breath.

He’s got to go back. He knows that. He’s not stupid enough to think he can run away for hours at a time, and nobody will say nothing, and he can’t just abandon the tour midway through, and even if he wanted to, there’s nowhere to run to. His passport and all his stuff are on the bus or back in the hotel and good luck trying to get through Customs without that.

But he’s so scared of going back. It’s fear of the unknown and he hates the unknown so much. It’s what got him on this discipline track in the first place because he couldn’t handle it like Georg or Gustav or Bill. And he knows he’s not just in for a punishment like normal. It’ll be hard, and it’ll hurt, and maybe it’ll even involve a serious talk and that makes him want to be sick.

His coffee is cold.

 _I’m coming back._ He sends Bill.

 _Good boy._ Georg texts back.

 

\--

 

Tom is back in the hotel room.

He’s been bellowed at by security, ripped a new asshole by David and Dunja, told he’s a moron and a fucking brat, and he needs to shape up and never, ever ,ever do that again, or they’ll tie him to Saki and make sure he never goes to the bathroom on his own again, and if he ever wants to be able to wander around on his own, he better forget it right now, right the fuck now, because he’s famous and someone could have killed him or kidnapped him or a  stupid fucking tabloid could have written some fucked up story about the band breaking up, causing panic and lost sales and everything else that managers have to worry about.

And then everybody hugged him because they’d been so panicked over losing him like that. It hurt them, David said as he held Tom close. They could only hope for the best, while imagining the worst.

But now, Tom is kneeling face first in the corner of Gustav’s bedroom, hoping to God that he’s not going to earn a black card for this, and he can’t help crying. He held it together through the shouting and the yelling and the hug, but as soon as Gustav shut the door behind him, he lost it.

Georg carefully buckled the collar around his neck as soon as he walked in the door, before they’d even said anything to him,, the black leather lukewarm against his skin, but the chain was ice cold. Tom had been flat out prohibited from speaking.

And then he’d been left in the corner, and the only words that had been said to him were _eighteen minutes_ and   _don’t move._

He sobs, and sobs, and sobs, and behind him, he can hear movement and whispers, and the bathroom door bangs open and shut several times, and he knows that he’s in for it now. All he’s seen of Bill and Gustav and Georg is stony faced resolution.

“Nose to the wall, Tom,” Georg says to him when he drifts backwards, and he obediently moves closer to the cream wallpaper.

Time out isn’t a punishment because it hurts. Even though his knees are aching already. It’s a punishment because he has to think about what he’s done. There’s nothing to distract him, nothing to make him think about anything else but what he’s done, and he hates being confronted by himself. Tom doesn’t like the truth a lot of the time.

And staring at the wall means staring at the truth very very very hard.

 

\--

 

His knees hurt by the time he gets a hand on the back of his collar to pull him out of the corner. He’s not wearing the leash yet – there’s something infinitely more demeaning about being lead around by his collar, even the tiny autonomy of the leash not given to him.

“Kneel.” Gustav says, again, not relinquishing Tom’s collar, and Tom goes down again.

Georg sits on the sofa, but he doesn’t look relaxed or happy. He’s tired and his mouth pulled down in a way that doesn’t seem good, and Tom knows the unhappiness on his face is the result of his misadventure today. He needs to say something, to make them know he’s so fucking sorry about it.

“Shush, Tom,” he says when Tom tries to apologise again, and he just feels sick. “I think, _we,”_ Georg indicates himself and Bill and Gustav, “need to say some things to you, and you need to say something things to us. Honestly. And we all need to listen.”

“Yeah.” Bill murmurs from his position on the bed behind Tom but when Tom tries to turn, Gustav, who never left his side, holds him down.

“You scared us. All of us.” Georg lays out it out flat. “Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could get in contact with you. We had _no_ idea if you were safe or not.”

“I’m-“

Gustav slides his hand around to Tom’s mouth, holding it shut. “Shush.” He says, and Tom gets the message. Finally. “I understand that you were scared because you got a red today. But you should have talked to us.”

“The rule says that you can ask to have it explained to you.” Gustav still hasn’t let go of Tom’s face but Tom refrains from protesting. “And you can talk about it with us. Fairly and rationally, no shouting at us.”

Tom closes his eyes.

“You need to be mature about it but we’re willing to listen and to try to understand where you’re coming from. Not enough sleep, maybe you’re stressed about something we don’t know about, maybe you’re hurt and we need to take care of you.” He’s done that one before - pulled his back trying to lift too much in his suitcase, and he’d been so short in his words and manner all day because of the pain. He hadn’t known he’d needed to get it checked over to make sure he’d not done something serious, and then rest it. Georg had had to make that one clear to him.

Painfully so.

“Why did you run?” Bill asks, and Tom _longs_ to turn around but he knows it’s not permissible. Gustav lets go of his face but his grip on Tom’s collar tightens.

“I was scared.”

“Of?”

“I…I don’t know.” He doesn’t. He knows he didn’t want the punishment, and that he knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant, and he fucking _knew_ it wasn’t going to just go away but he doesn’t know why he ran. Logically, he knew then and still does now that it wouldn’t change anything. He’d still be in trouble, Bill still would give him an enema, he would still have to be spanked, and babysat for days and lose dessert, and everything else. It wouldn’t go away if he left.

But he still did.

Georg tries to press him more and Tom tells him what he was feeling at the time, but he doesn’t know whether it helps. There’s nothing in Georg’s face that tells him either way and he can’t see the other two.

“Do you think you don’t deserve a red?”

Bill’s question is valid but he did deserve it. He was rude and unpleasant and hurtful. He was lazy and grumpy this morning and his attitude didn’t improve throughout the day. So he doesn’t think it was unfair and he says so.

“Do you think you need a black?”

Gustav’s question brings Tom up short. He doesn’t know what a black involves. It’s an unknown entity, and the only way he understands it is that it’s significantly worse than red. But he knows that if he says no, and Gustav thinks he does, he’ll get one anyway, but if he says yes, and they don’t agree, he might still get anyway.

He’s got to have a realistic assessment of his own behaviour.

Or something.

 _“I don’t know.”_ Is what he settles on. He might deserve it, he might not but trying to make a guess in either direction when he doesn’t know for sure is only going to get worse.

“Good.”

When Gustav clips the leash onto the ring at the front, Tom knows he’s about to feel some real pain. Being spanked sucks fucking ass.

The first time was hard for all of them. Three of them didn’t quite know what they were doing, Tom had to be restrained, and Bill broke a nail trying to wield the paddle properly, and Gustav gave him too many which caused problems the next day.

But Georg knew _exactly_ what he was doing and it hasn’t changed in the intervening two years between then and now.

Georg has first go because he’s in charge tonight, with the paddle as usual, and Tom ends up shuffling towards him to go straight over his knee after having Gustav unbutton his jeans and pull them down, along with his underwear. This is the worst part – being exposed and made to wait for the pain to come, when every inch of him is telling him to run and the only thing keeping him down is Gustav’s hand through his collar.

Georg gives ten, but they’re not ten little baby slaps. Full force, full on, absolutely deliberate strokes and every single one is carefully measured to give the best possible reminder in the morning of what he did. Sometimes, Tom has to count it out loud, but he doesn’t this time, so he just has to hold onto Georg’s jeans, and pray.

Tom sobs even louder, and he struggles to stay down, but he knows – one more issue, one more problem, and he’d been ruined for life. Georg will give him that black, and then who knows what will happen?

And then Gustav gets his turn, and if anything, it is worse. Gustav doesn’t like the over the knee thing, had made it clear right from the very first time when Tom was sixteen and so confused with life. He likes Tom on the low coffee table, bottom raised high as he knelt forward, resting his forehead on the heavy pine surface, so his backside is at just the right height. His blows were also hard, fast, and incredibly painful. Drummers have hard hands, and Gustav is no exception to that rule. He gets ten from Gustav as well and they’re not easy.  

When Gustav is finished, Tom is panting, rocking, whining low in his throat, and Bill’s fingers around his are the only things stopping him from turning over and begging for mercy that is not owe to him, and will not come.

When Bill lets go, and Georg takes his place, Tom puts his head in his arms, and tries hard not wail out loud. He’s so close to losing it.

Getting spanked by Bill - his younger brother, his _baby_ brother was so hard to learn to tolerate. But there are times, like now, where Tom has to come to think of Bill not as his younger brother, but as his disciplinarian, as his controller, and grounding rock, and that’s what stops him from hitting back.

You can fight your younger brother, and Tom does and will continue to do so no matter what Bill says because it’s his right as oldest. But he can’t fight when Bill’s like this.

Because Bill has authority now, and Tom doesn’t so that’s how it works.

Bill gives him ten.  

They are the worst ten in his life because he can feel Bill’s anger but also his sadness and his disappointment. Bill was the one Tom ran out on, the one who Tom landed in deepest shit because he was supposed to be taking care of Tom and there is nothing to be done but take the punishment because he deserves it.                                       

He feels so stupid, so dumb and angry and sad and confused and Bill makes him bleed it out until he confesses everything and explains himself through tears and sobs and pleas for forgiveness. It’s always been how they work. Georg and Gustav break him down, but Bill absolutely lays waste to any other defences he might have left.

He rests on the coffee table, panting and still only with his trousers pulled down but every inch of him hurts. Everything wants to stop, and he hooks two fingers in his collar to give him the strength to carry on.

The collar isn’t something he loves - not really - but at times like this, it’s the symbol of his choice to submit. He needs reminding of it when it’s at the hardest point, when he feels like saying, _Fuck you, Georg!_ or _I hate you all!_ because he knows he doesn’t actually feel that way. It’s just a surface emotion, his gut reaction rather than the real logic he understands behind what’s happening to him. When he’s wearing the collar, he has to actively choose to put himself in someone else’s hands and let them do what’s best for him, and it reminds him of that.

He sobs on the table, holding his collar, and Gustav just rests his hand on the small of Tom’s back. Tom knows it’s Gustav even before he opens his eyes just to check because of the calmness in that hand. Gustav _radiates_ calmness at times like this, just projecting it and Tom fucking _needs_ it. He craves it. When he’s so confused and hurting, and it feels so bad, he needs that gentle calm authority beside him. Gustav’s not hugging him though, nobody will until the end - hugs mean forgiveness and Tom is not yet forgiven, but it’s saying, _we’re here,_ and _you’ll be okay in the end._ Tom tries to take comfort from the heavy weight of it.

Somewhere over the other side of the room, there’s the sound of a door opening briefly. From inside the bathroom, he can hear running water until the heavy door swings shut again. Bill calls his name.

_Bath time._


End file.
